Company Performance Metrics
Udacity is the outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. Thrun has stated he hopes half a million students will enroll, after an enrollment of 160,000 students in the predecessor course at Stanford, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and 90,000 students had enrolled in the initial two classes as
of March 2012. Udacity was announced at the 2012 Digital Life Design conference. Udacity is funded by venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and $200,000 of Thrun's personal money. In October 2012, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the investment of another $15 million in Udacity In November 2013, Thrun announced in a Fast Company article that Udacity had a "lousy product" and that the service was pivoting to focus more on vocational courses for professionals and "nanodegrees." As of 28 April 2014, Udacity has 1.6 million users in 12 full courses and 26 free courseware.
In 2014, the Georgia Institute of Technology launched the first "massive online open degree" in computer science by partnering with Udacity and AT&T; a complete master's degree through that program costs students $7,000.
In October 2017, Udacity along with Unity, launched ‘Learn ARKit’ program which could help developers improve their AR application building skills.[23][24] In the same month, Google partnered with Udacity to launch a new scholarship initiative for aspiring Web and Android application developers. While not yet profitable as of February 2018, Udacity is valued at over $1 billion having raised $163 million from noted investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Drive Capital, and Alphabet's venture capital arm, GV.
